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Facebook ads: spent $1000, got 20 clicks and 0 sales Is that for real? Is everyone else's experience with Facebook advertising similar?

by soreal 10y ago

ohyoutravel 10y ago
I had the same experience with Facebook and with Google AdWords. Zero sales, not that many clicks.
- sosborn 10y ago
  Sometimes it's the platform and sometimes it's the product.
JPTeasdale 10y ago
It's real. I asked all my digital marketing friends for advice too. I made ~20 iterations, tried different pictures, headlines, targeting schemes to no avail. There are def ways to make it work, but it's not an easy thing. If I were to try again, I'd make an audio-less video.
- netrap 10y ago
  How about adding an ad on reddit?
- madenine 10y ago
  Getting started from 0 with ads on facebook is hard. If you don't have good email lists, have the money to throw at ads to figure out your ad groups / demographics (just because purple fish people are your #1 customers doesn't mean they buy things off of facebook ads), and don't have a whole ecosystem (landing pages, cross platform re targeting, etc), its an uphill battle that even the pros can't always get working right. Good on you for trying. Back when I ran ads, a common story from small clients was "I spent $50 - $200 and didn't get any sales, so I figured it wasn't for us" - At least you figured out it wasn't for you, or it wasn't for your budget/time scale.
- xphilter 10y ago
  Judging by the game, your target market is not the type of person who responds to a Facebook ad. I'm running tons of ads on FB, but my market is less sophisticated. I'm surprised by how many responses we get.
- simonbarker87 10y ago
  Just to throw in our experience (hardware product, UK market) we've tried facebook a few of times over the last 3 years. The initial attempt was a massive fail, we wasted about £3K on facebook ads to generate about £300 in sales. Following season we focussed on TV ads and generating lots of reviews from our existing happy customers. We then gave facebook another attempt at the end of the season and generated as much sales and traffic as all of the tv advertising for about £3k of facebook ads. The primary difference was knowing who our customer is - which we learned from the TV ad customers, you can probably learn from your Kickstarter backers. For all of the TV generated sales we got reviews and sent out surveys to each customer. From this, we learned 1. What people loved about the product (which we could use is ad copy) and 2. Who they were and why they purchased. This allowed us to create very targetted facebook ad campaigns and hence the improved ROI. Facebook is excellent at generating very cheap traffic but only when you get the audience dialed in. Also, read anything written by Nick Kolenda (http://www.nickkolenda.com/ http://www.nickkolenda.com/) amazing stuff.
thearn4 10y ago
I've heard a lot of similar experiences using both FB and Google. I feel like the entire ad-tech industry is a house of cards that is bound to topple over at some point.
- angry-hacker 10y ago
  Not really, it works great for some people. I'm very interested constantly turning over 1.2x roi using FB. There are just specific types of campaigns you don't do using FB and if you're not experienced you most likely burn money.
- gph 10y ago
  Which is kind of scary given that most the major internet services (search, social media, news, etc.) are basing their entire business models around advertising. Would hate to see the state of the economy if that started to dry up.
- colechristensen 10y ago
  You have to be good at it! Yes, it's very possible to throw money into a hole with advertising. If you're selling something people don't want, targeting the wrong people, or have ads that don't work with your audience then you'll get nothing back. Buying advertising isn't a guarantee. Lots of people with little advertising experience would do good to seek out tools and advice to get started.
  - JPTeasdale 10y ago
    Oh yeah. I've def click on other people's Facebook ads. It's not a skill that I had and we didn't have the bankroll for me to get good at it.
- this-dang-guy 10y ago
  I think it is too. We finally killed our campaigns on bing, google, and fb - we go with just a few smaller ads on more targeted platforms... and get 10x the results for 1% of the money. Still nothing to brag about, but money on adwords is definitely money wasted
wmeredith 10y ago
I did the same thing, except I turned it off after $500. My professional opinion is that Facebook's platform is very accessible for anyone to get up and running with (good). And in terms of offering advertisers good analytics and actionable feedback, it's pretty much garbage (bad). My background: I spent a couple years optimizing Google PPC campaigns as a full-time professional when I was at a digital marketing agency. I held Adwords certification for a couple years. I added this so people don't think I just couldn't figure out how to do PPC in general.
- Mahn 10y ago
  It depends a lot on the product and the audience, but from my experience, you are never going to get results with your first $500 or $1000 on Facebook Ads, regardless your background. It takes a lot of trial and error just to understand what works, and then some more to drill down, get better, lower costs, etc. I'd say you are looking at three months and several thousand dollars of experimenting at least to start getting decent results, even with a strong PPC background. Facebook is just a completely different beast. You can most definitely not set up your first campaign, pick the first targeting criteria that comes to mind, and expect good results with a positive ROI within the same day. If you don't keep at, it of course you are going to walk out with the idea that Facebook Ads don't work. Source: Spent a six figure amount on Facebook over the course of two years.
  - eli 10y ago
    Further, I think this is true of all advertising to some degree. I doubt the first print ad or billboard you buy has positive ROI.
  - ClassyJacket 10y ago
    >You can most definitely not set up your first campaign, pick the first targeting criteria that comes to mind, and expect good results with a positive ROI within the same day. I have actually literally done this. Just took a stab at an audience, got sales that justified the ad right away. But we're in a great position with profit margins. They're hand assembled craft items that people generally buy for gifts or weddings, so cost to make is low and sell price is pretty good. Businesses that require high volume on low margins would have a much worse time.
LastZactionHero 10y ago
I have the same thought in the Facebook Ads and Google Adwords control panel that I do sitting down at a craps table: "I'm going to lose all of this, aren't I?"
- rlucas 10y ago
  If you're sitting at the craps table then you're the only one who is likely to win...
- shostack 10y ago
  Are you very experienced with either? As someone who manages digital media for a living and has dealt with 8 figure budgets, I certainly don't feel that way. However I'm very aware of how expectations are often not properly set by either company. In their quest to reduce the friction to people's wallets Google and FB in some ways portray it as clicking a few buttons, creating a couple ads, selecting some suggested targets and you'll make a ton of money right off the bat. And perhaps that used to work to some degree. The reality is that professionals tend to change or disable most of the defaults because they don't perform well or have other issues. We then go in implementing tried and tested best practices, knowing full well performance will still suck initially and that we have a long, expensive road of testing and optimization before we have things dialed in. It is a tough business challenge because to some degree it is like trying to cram something simplistic like Paint into a hugely technical and complex platform like Photoshop. You just wanted to draw a damn cat, but there are all these confusing menus and tool bars, these weird layer things, and before you know it you've wasted an afternoon and end up just paying someone to draw it for you before you waste more time.
increment_i 10y ago
In my anecdotal experience, Facebook is really only good for the very top of the funnel. And even then it's sketchy. Creating awareness or piquing interest with your one sentence value prop (e.g "Never manage servers again!", "Write native iOS apps in COBOL!", etc.) seems to be the best use of it.
rezashirazian 10y ago
Facebook ads work best for retargeting. If someone has viewed your site and shown interest in your product but has not converted.
- greglindahl 10y ago
  Don't many customers view this as being creepy? Does it cause more brand damage than the sales are worth?
  - rezashirazian 10y ago
    I don't think retargeting is particularly creepy. What is creepy is that when my in-laws were visiting for the first time I had a American Express ad with Tina Fey congratulating me on meeting my in laws for the first time. the ad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rEX5e-_YxxA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rEX5e-_YxxA
    - lostlogin 10y ago
      That would put me off both the advertiser and the platform (Facebook? Google?) for life.
jyu 10y ago
If you've spent $1000, got 20 clicks and 0 sales, then either your targeting or your ad or both are piss poor. I have made quite a lot of money (and lost quite a lot in the beginning) advertising on Facebook ads in the past. Just because you have a lot of experience with Google Search PPC doesn't mean you'll have success with Facebook, and visa versa. It depends very much on the product, how broad or niche the appeal is, the price point, the approaches you've tried. You need to know the target demographics of who your customer is, and Facebook is one of many cost effective avenues to reaching certain types of people. You need to be creative in creating great ad images, ad copy, a good landing page, and measuring actions that tie directly to increased revenue. These are all basic common sense things, but I have yet to see someone's campaign that didn't have some obvious flaw that set them up for failure. There are a lot of ways to fail and only a few ways to succeed.
- NicoJuicy 10y ago
  In my opinion, the niche with likes are mostly people who like everything
- JPTeasdale 10y ago
  Yeah, I know there is a way to do it. I assume most people who are also just coming out of a Kickstarter will have a similar lack of experience with online marketing. I could be more clear about the purpose being to temper expectations.
jseliger 10y ago
That was pretty much ours: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12969922 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12969922. Our best advertising bang has for years been our blog: http://www.seliger.com/blog http://www.seliger.com/blog, in part because many of the topics we write about are also the kinds of search strings people interested in hiring us tend to use.
NicoJuicy 10y ago
I had success with Facebook with Pokemon Go, I don't believe it's easy reproducible on a lot of other things. I wrote everything down here : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12858993 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12858993 Tldr; don't do Facebook ads if your not doing a hype and if don't want to give things away for free If you only want useless likes locked in on Facebook, you should do go all on. Remember, you can't easy notify the people who liked your page even though you payed for them
sbov 10y ago
Ours wasn't as dismal (the zero sales part), but in order to get a sale we had to spend ~5 times as much on Facebook ads vs. Google ads. The bounce rate alone from Facebook ads was just under 3x that of Google ads - around 90%. I'm assuming a lot of Facebook ad clicks are accidental.
dxbydt 10y ago
Try a good subreddit. So far spent <$5, got 300+ impressions, 5 click throughs and 5 subscriptions.
- JPTeasdale 10y ago
  Thanks for the tip. I will look at that.
- jakebellacera 10y ago
  Agreed. Tight-knit communities are by far the best way to market your product/service. Low volume, but high quality if you can pull it off. The catch is that you have to toe the line between being "that annoying marketing person" and someone who's genuinely trying to help out the community. If you aren't trying to help them out, then you'll find yourself being voted out of the tribe very quickly.
cyberferret 10y ago
About 4 years ago, we got fairly good response rates from Facebook advertising (for SaaS apps, rather than physical products), but nowadays, FB advertising is next to useless. The stats in the article pretty much reflect what we see these days. At most, we get 'Likes' on our app FB page, but pretty much NEVER get any click throughs or sign ups to our apps.
semi-extrinsic 10y ago
Well, Facebook's been around for about ten years now, and people tend to check it about once a day, on average, with (say) 5 ads per visit. So you've personally been served something like 20 000 targeted (!) ads on Facebook, if not more. Have you ever intentionally clicked one? I sure haven't.
- frikk 10y ago
  I'll say one thing about FB advertising. It really is starting to get creepy. I recently entered several new markets and FB was the first to start advertising. I can't believe I'm saying it, but I clicked a few links. A few of them I opened a new tab and googled the company name, just to feel less grimy.
  - 467568985476 10y ago
    That probably still counted as an attribution.
    - frikk 10y ago
      You're probably right.
- robryan 10y ago
  Sponsored articles from pages I have already liked I sometimes click on. Retargetting works okay for us, nothing amazing but at the same time it isn't throwing money away.
  - zem 10y ago
    i've stopped liking pages entirely because facebook has started showing you sponsored content from pages your friends liked. i didn't mind clicking like to increase the like count for companies i wanted to support, but i do not want to have any part in my friends being shown ads.
- ninjakeyboard 10y ago
aantix 10y ago
You guys may be in a position to make Facebook Ads work, because of your existing customer list. If I recall correctly, setting up the appropriate demographic channels is way too hit or miss. It'll be an expensive education. BUT, if you have an existing customer list (like yourselves), FB gives you an option to upload those existing customer emails and it will do some AI matching to find the appropriate customer demographic pools? From the tutorial I read, this was the only chance you'd have to get any sort of traction on your campaign right out of the gate. Disclosure #1 : I've never run a Facebook ad campaign in my life just read several tutorials regarding running a successful campaign. Disclosure #2: I don't remember where I read this information, but given the fact that FB knows everyone's interests (directly and indirectly from statuses and likes), their algorithmic assessment of who should see the ad could be worth trying.
mbesto 10y ago
FB works really well for established brands, because of the sharing component and the idea that when you see the ad it doesn't look like an ad.
chimpnuggets 10y ago
You have to find your audience, which is usually doable, but takes iteration and experimentation. The trick is keeping the cost of testing as low as possible. 100 $1 campaigns are going to have a better return than 1 $100 campaign.
Pils 10y ago
It's widely known that Facebook is worse than Google in terms of conversions. People go to search engines to find something, people go on to Facebook to browse Facebook. What Facebook offers over Adwords is fine-tuned demographic targeting. So it's good for brand awareness (think traditional TV ads) and products that require targeting very specific demographics where the few conversions are highly valuable(new CS grad hiring, women on dating websites).
- shostack 10y ago
  It very much depends on your goal. Many advertisers, myself included would say "it depends on your goal." Search has some major limitations over paid social for things like branding campaigns. Even for direct response it is hardly black and white. I have FB campaigns that have performed better than some search campaigns.
yoo1I 10y ago
This turns out to be an argument for ad-blocking. By blocking all ads, because I am not going to buy anything from an ad anyhow, I'm not being counted towards your bill, which makes things cheaper for you and more pleasant for me. You're welcome.
- incogitomode 10y ago
  Yes, exactly that. I'd love an easy option to only include ads on sites that I trust, or that do ads well, and some reliable metrics surrounding that. Then content producers could get some feedback on "ad acceptance rates" and create better user experiences. Now that I think about it, one of the most obnoxious things about online ads isn't that they are eerily intelligent, but that they are still mostly dumb forms of broadcast.
- bduerst 10y ago
  Only for awareness marketing. Usually direct response marketing (like ads to buy a game) is paid per click, so you weren't getting people charged before you started ad blocking, when you weren't clicking on the ad anyways. And as a beside, people typically don't do direct response marketing to engineers, because it's known they don't click on ads and they're better marketed to through referrals from other engineers and online content (like this article).
jscheel 10y ago
Hahahahahaha, I've blown much, much more for the same result. Lesson learned.
jrgifford 10y ago
That's the ROI I'm seeing at some of my clients. That said, there is one that is having great success ($10/conversion, average conversion value $200 @ 40% margin) with it because of how they targeted their ads and what they're for (consumer products).
bduerst 10y ago
$50 CPC is not unheard of before optimizing the ad content or ad targeting. Keep in mind that Facebook ads are more like display ads than search ads - users don't necessarily have a specific intent when getting the impression, so they're less likely to give you a direct response.
sean_patel 10y ago
> Is that for real? Is everyone else's experience with Facebook advertising similar? Yeah. It's called "Facebook Fraud". See a real live experiment someone did, to figure out the true reach and ROI on Facebook Advertizing. => https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVfHeWTKjag https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVfHeWTKjag I too did a similar experiment using a pre-paid Visa card (for 50$) so that FB doesn't keep charging my Credit Card and/or lets it get stolen from bad security practices. My results were similar to the guy in the Youtube Video. Facebook's likes and "reach" are mostly automated or from in-house click-farms in South-east asia (think India, Vietnam, Phillipines etc)
- vacri 10y ago
  That video is well worth a watch, but to summarise it: the channel owner's users are predominantly first-world and engage with his channel to some degree. He purchased FB advertising to promote his channel, and got a huge amount of traffic 'from' third-world locations that didn't engage (leave comments, etc) and that came from content-free FB accounts that liked hundreds to thousands of FB pages with no particular pattern. Couldn't be more obviously a scam if it was twirling a waxed moustache.
  - asdfasdfa11112 10y ago
    I've had this experience as well. I'd love an opportunity to chat with someone who runs these click farms for a living, so I can understand their motivations a little more clearly. I can't wrap my head around why someone would run a bot farm to click on my FB ads. It's not like AdSense, where they're getting a cut. I've read a theory it's to hide the bot accounts from Facebook's bot-detectors. But if people like in your experience can easily ID the obviously fake accounts, FB can (using the same criteria you mentioned). I get FB has moral hazard to allow bot clicks, because they get paid. But if they're so sophisticated as to require fake engagement on ads (which is why I care -- I'm getting charged!), wouldn't they also be monitoring the simple heuristic you provided? This could be explained by Facebook requiring bots to make them money to not get banned, but I don't think there's sufficient evidence for such a conspiracy just yet. In the end, all I care about is how much I put into FB ads, and how much directly attributable revenue that generates. The fraud might hide otherwise profitable campaigns (ones that don't break even), but frequently this isn't the primary concern. (My concerns are usually, "does this part of Lake Facebook have any fish I can catch?", followed by the step 2 of optimizing the campaign to get a positive ROI.
barkingcat 10y ago
Anecdotal response: As a user, I hate facebook ads so much that the dislike bleeds into the product/service being advertised. I'm sure xyz widget is great on its own, but facebook insists on inserting ads into really strange contexts, like next to a heart felt eulogy by my friend or someone's random anti-Trump rant that I am tagged in. Facebook ads for me are "anti-ads". They associate the product with really bad feelings through poor contextualization.
- prawn 10y ago
  Not a Facebook user, but I see Twitter ads. If they're irrelevant to my interests, and almost all are, I flag them with the "Not relevant" link, which has become the awkwardly named "I don't like this". I'm routinely surprised that despite me talking openly about my interests, I just don't get relevant ads. On one of my most frequently used sites (about basketball), the ads this week have been all womens fashion. I've not searched womens fashion and my wife doesn't use my laptop or phone. Waste of ad money.
  - nostrebored 10y ago
    The timing of the ad makes me think that they are going after holiday shoppers. Might not be a waste?
    - prawn 10y ago
      In theory perhaps you're right. But for women's dresses, I'd be advertising to women, not hoping men dare buy clothes for their partner!
  - yorwba 10y ago
    They probably guessed that you were male and then showed you women's fashion to make you buy something for your wife. I have come to understand advertising a lot better since I asked, while looking at some lingerie ad, "Who would ever want to wear something like that?" and someone replied "This ad is for your spouse who wants to see you in this."
ozi 10y ago
No, those results are beyond abysmal. CTR for my campaigns rarely dip below 2% with optimized advertisements and audiences.
thefalcon 10y ago
I've actually had good experience with selling hugely discounted shoes through Facebook ads. But then our target market was older women who legitimately enjoyed sharing their love of our $9 shoes with their Facebook friends.
ClassyJacket 10y ago
I've had amazing results with Facebook ads. We usually turn 20$ into a couple of sales of 40$ items with high margins. I've got a new ad going up in 4 hours. That being said, if the profit margin on the items wasn't so high it would be far worse. We're in a particularly good position that way. But on the other hand I haven't done alot of analytics or improvement on the ads either.
rpeden 10y ago
I've seen quite a few Shopify store owners in a group on Facebook mentioning that they've had good results using Facebook ads. I've only used Facebook ads to have a bit of fun and boost a picture of my cat[1]. He got a couple of likes after I'd spent about 50 cents, which pretty much achieved my goal. [1]https://www.facebook.com/gerrytuxedocat/posts/1218470848199855 https://www.facebook.com/gerrytuxedocat/posts/12184708481998...
encoderer 10y ago
No different than AdWords, many people lose money. But many people make money, too. The first mistake is thinking "how hard could it be?"
kybernetyk 10y ago
Worse. At least they got clicks. (But tbh. that was some years ago when the advertising stuff was new to FB ... so maybe it got better by now).
nickpsecurity 10y ago
You'd be surprised how your marketing strategies will fail when starting a business. Best, recent writeup is Clifford's below. Really shows the level of apathy and confusion you will experience. :) https://medium.com/@cliffordoravec/expect-everything-to-be-unexpected-883642c0d7c https://medium.com/@cliffordoravec/expect-everything-to-be-u...
appleiigs 10y ago
We've spent $2300, reached 140,000 people (according to FB). 11,000 of those visited our website. We also have 7300 likes on our Facebook page which we post to every few days. $2,300 on marketing is peanuts, so we believe is worth it to be able to directly contact 7,300 people who expressed interest in our business. These people are also liking and sharing our posts.
- mdrzn 10y ago
  You have 7300 likes on the Facebook page, you can't directly contact those 7300 people. There's a huge difference.
  - appleiigs 10y ago
    Can you explain the difference for me? When we post, it shows up in their FB feed.
    - r3bl 10y ago
      Not to everyone. Neither do all of the pages that you've liked over the years show up in your news feed. Basically, the procedure is the following: post is shown to a small minority while a proportion of the people seeing it engages with your content: show the content to more people So, if the initial... let's say 200 people that see the post on your Facebook page are not engaging with it, the content wouldn't be spread further among people who liked your page. If they engage with it, the content will be spread further. That small minority decides the future of your post. If you have non-genuine likes that are not interested in your content at all (as in, not engaging with it), but they see the post first, you're gonna have to spend money to promote posts.
      - mdrzn 10y ago
        This. Also, under each post there should be written how many people it has reached.
dtwhitney 10y ago
A company I know well cough is built an app and pays about $7/download via Facebook ads. This company has tried many other options and while it has gotten more conversions using alternatives, the users have tended to be poorer in quality (much lower DAUs/MAUs). I have heard the average cost/download via Facebook is lower than $7 (maybe $5) for an app like this one, but I think it has been worth the money spent, and I would/will do it again. And yeah this company has spent quite a bit more than $1k on these ads. Downloading a free App is a lower hurdle than buying a card game, so it doesn't surprise me that the author didn't see many conversions. I have read that if your customer acquisitions costs are less than or equal to the money you expect to make off of them during your first year with the customer (supposing a subscription model, not unlike a card game with expansion packs), then you are doing well. The author has seen that his customers have often become repeat customers, so it may be ok to expect that $17.76 is an ok price to pay per converted user, so long as you expect some larger percentage of them will come back for expansion packs. Some notes: DUDE! it took me WAY TOO LONG to figure out where to buy your game! The link to the product is at THE VERY BOTTOM of your Medium article. PUT IT AT THE TOP WHERE YOU MENTION IT FOR THE FIRST TIME (sorry for yelling). Make it easy for people to find and buy your game!
- JPTeasdale 10y ago
  Haha, you got it!
  - retreatguru 10y ago
    I like that the price of your game $17.76 hints to the date of the Declaration of Independence.
Trundle 10y ago
Plenty of companies have success. There are tons of digital marketers killing it on there. The level of targeting you can achieve is absurd. It's zero sum game where you compete against other advertisers though. Because of this it seems incredibly obvious to me that it'll almost certainly be unprofitable until you've done a lot of work to optimise your campaign (as you're competing with bids against people who have optimised their campaigns) and also probably be incredibly unprofitable if you're not a full time professional digital marketer specialising in facebook ads (because that's who you're most likely competing against for eyeballs). Yet I see average punters throwing tiny budgets around and failing at facebook used as evidence that facebook advertising is garbage on a regular basis.
- JPTeasdale 10y ago
  Oh, I'm not trying to make the case that it's impossible. Just that it seems a lot easier than it is. Most people coming out of a Kickstarter wont have several thousand dollars to figure out how to say "This hoodie, created by a mom, is over 1,000,000 on Kickstarter".
odbol_ 10y ago
It's pretty hard, and super expensive. One thing that really helped us is AdEspresso. Give it a few different pictures and blurbs, and it combines them in all possible ways and A/B tests all the combinations. Then you can pick the winners and refine them. Indispensable tool, even though we only got up to a 2% click-through rate (avg is 3-4%)
ChrisNorstrom 10y ago
Yes. Same here. I've tried Google Adwords, Facebook Ads, Reddit Ads, BlogAds aimed at design websites, and a custom placement by a site itself (paid $300 for a top header ad (the best position) and got nothing from it.) Literally hundreds of dollars wasted and not a single sale. I was pissed. People ignore ads. 1 year I was simply mentioned on DesignMilk.com and my calendar sold out. The following year I paid $300 to advertise at the top of DesignMilk.com and didn't get a single sale. That's what really made me realize advertising is highly unwanted. When I ask around to other inventors and sellers of physical products, Advertising is just a waste (except if you're selling a high priced item that can easily make the money back on a few sales). It's a suckers game if you're like me, selling a low cost item at high volume. If the advertising worked for all these businesses they would keep doing it. They don't. They run a few campaigns, advertise for a bit, watch it fail, then leave, and the next sucker takes their place. Unless you're one of those big box stores that advertise every week. But you are not walmart or target. You do not make millions in revenue a day. You cannot afford to run full color catalog ads bundled with newspapers every single week. Also, don't let flash sales fool you. Back when I sold my large format physical paper calendar on Fab.com (back when it was big, it went bankrupt and reorganized due to... spending too much on advertising and not enough revenue, ironic isn't it) I sold out in less than 1 month. All 300 units sold out at $15 each. When they reorganized I was literally ruined. They no longer took in calendars like mine. I was stuck selling on Amazon.com and Ebay.com and Etsy.com and sold just a few units. But man was the journey worth it. I lost thousands but I learned enough to justify it.
Kiro 10y ago
Not at all. My latest campaign gave me 129 clicks for $30.
thisiszen 10y ago
By tracking people that converted and then feeding that into Facebook's Lookalike Audience we were able to drop the cost per lead to about a third of the original cost over time (from $78 to $27). It beat everything else (TV, display ads, retargeting, SEM, etc), to the point where we only did that. We've noticed that every time we stopped the ads, or changed the targeting parameters/audience, it would take a while for Facebook to get back to the same results. p.s The lead cost was that high because we were selling $200k land + $500k houses from a small tropical country to US consumers that may have never even heard of that country.
gadders 10y ago
I bought a kickstarter after seeing it adverstised on Facebook. That is some anecdata at least. I have to say, though, a lot of the stuff advertised on Facebook and Instagram seems kind of dodgy. Unless I am just being targeted for dodgy stuff by their algorithms.
diegogcouto 10y ago
In my experience, we're able to create a lot more engagement using Facebook, but you have to consider that we're a niche startup in Brazil (where CPC seems to be cheaper). On the other hand, most of the users we got from Facebook were a kind of "freebie hunters". As soon as they saw it would be necessary to pay a monthly fee to use our services (It's an app! Am I really supposed to pay for this?), most of them disappeared. In the end, as someone has already mentioned here, Facebook seems to be a really good place to advertise free stuff or products that can naturally trigger some emotional response (Look at this lovely products made by this grandma)... and maybe just them.
lorda 10y ago
It seems extortionately high. I've just started with some small ads for an ecommerce site I'm playing about with. Currently costing £0.34 per click, with a relevancy of 6. This is optimising for sending visitors to my website though. If you focus on page likes or soemthing, then it's not likely you'll get very good off-site CTR

Facebook ads: spent $1000, got 20 clicks and 0 sales Is that for real? Is everyone else's experience with Facebook advertising similar?

by soreal 10y ago

Facebook ads: spent $1000, got 20 clicks and 0 sales Is that for real? Is everyone else's experience with Facebook advertising similar?

ohyoutravel 10y ago

I had the same experience with Facebook and with Google AdWords. Zero sales, not that many clicks.

sosborn 10y ago
Sometimes it's the platform and sometimes it's the product.

JPTeasdale 10y ago

It's real. I asked all my digital marketing friends for advice too. I made ~20 iterations, tried different pictures, headlines, targeting schemes to no avail. There are def ways to make it work, but it's not an easy thing. If I were to try again, I'd make an audio-less video.

netrap 10y ago
How about adding an ad on reddit?
madenine 10y ago
Getting started from 0 with ads on facebook is hard. If you don't have good email lists, have the money to throw at ads to figure out your ad groups / demographics (just because purple fish people are your #1 customers doesn't mean they buy things off of facebook ads), and don't have a whole ecosystem (landing pages, cross platform re targeting, etc), its an uphill battle that even the pros can't always get working right. Good on you for trying. Back when I ran ads, a common story from small clients was "I spent $50 - $200 and didn't get any sales, so I figured it wasn't for us" - At least you figured out it wasn't for you, or it wasn't for your budget/time scale.
xphilter 10y ago
Judging by the game, your target market is not the type of person who responds to a Facebook ad. I'm running tons of ads on FB, but my market is less sophisticated. I'm surprised by how many responses we get.
simonbarker87 10y ago
Just to throw in our experience (hardware product, UK market) we've tried facebook a few of times over the last 3 years. The initial attempt was a massive fail, we wasted about £3K on facebook ads to generate about £300 in sales. Following season we focussed on TV ads and generating lots of reviews from our existing happy customers. We then gave facebook another attempt at the end of the season and generated as much sales and traffic as all of the tv advertising for about £3k of facebook ads. The primary difference was knowing who our customer is - which we learned from the TV ad customers, you can probably learn from your Kickstarter backers. For all of the TV generated sales we got reviews and sent out surveys to each customer. From this, we learned 1. What people loved about the product (which we could use is ad copy) and 2. Who they were and why they purchased. This allowed us to create very targetted facebook ad campaigns and hence the improved ROI. Facebook is excellent at generating very cheap traffic but only when you get the audience dialed in. Also, read anything written by Nick Kolenda (http://www.nickkolenda.com/ http://www.nickkolenda.com/) amazing stuff.

thearn4 10y ago

I've heard a lot of similar experiences using both FB and Google. I feel like the entire ad-tech industry is a house of cards that is bound to topple over at some point.

angry-hacker 10y ago
Not really, it works great for some people. I'm very interested constantly turning over 1.2x roi using FB. There are just specific types of campaigns you don't do using FB and if you're not experienced you most likely burn money.
gph 10y ago
Which is kind of scary given that most the major internet services (search, social media, news, etc.) are basing their entire business models around advertising. Would hate to see the state of the economy if that started to dry up.
colechristensen 10y ago
You have to be good at it! Yes, it's very possible to throw money into a hole with advertising. If you're selling something people don't want, targeting the wrong people, or have ads that don't work with your audience then you'll get nothing back. Buying advertising isn't a guarantee. Lots of people with little advertising experience would do good to seek out tools and advice to get started.
- JPTeasdale 10y ago
  Oh yeah. I've def click on other people's Facebook ads. It's not a skill that I had and we didn't have the bankroll for me to get good at it.
this-dang-guy 10y ago
I think it is too. We finally killed our campaigns on bing, google, and fb - we go with just a few smaller ads on more targeted platforms... and get 10x the results for 1% of the money. Still nothing to brag about, but money on adwords is definitely money wasted

wmeredith 10y ago

I did the same thing, except I turned it off after $500. My professional opinion is that Facebook's platform is very accessible for anyone to get up and running with (good). And in terms of offering advertisers good analytics and actionable feedback, it's pretty much garbage (bad). My background: I spent a couple years optimizing Google PPC campaigns as a full-time professional when I was at a digital marketing agency. I held Adwords certification for a couple years. I added this so people don't think I just couldn't figure out how to do PPC in general.

Mahn 10y ago
It depends a lot on the product and the audience, but from my experience, you are never going to get results with your first $500 or $1000 on Facebook Ads, regardless your background. It takes a lot of trial and error just to understand what works, and then some more to drill down, get better, lower costs, etc. I'd say you are looking at three months and several thousand dollars of experimenting at least to start getting decent results, even with a strong PPC background. Facebook is just a completely different beast. You can most definitely not set up your first campaign, pick the first targeting criteria that comes to mind, and expect good results with a positive ROI within the same day. If you don't keep at, it of course you are going to walk out with the idea that Facebook Ads don't work. Source: Spent a six figure amount on Facebook over the course of two years.
- eli 10y ago
  Further, I think this is true of all advertising to some degree. I doubt the first print ad or billboard you buy has positive ROI.
- ClassyJacket 10y ago
  >You can most definitely not set up your first campaign, pick the first targeting criteria that comes to mind, and expect good results with a positive ROI within the same day. I have actually literally done this. Just took a stab at an audience, got sales that justified the ad right away. But we're in a great position with profit margins. They're hand assembled craft items that people generally buy for gifts or weddings, so cost to make is low and sell price is pretty good. Businesses that require high volume on low margins would have a much worse time.

LastZactionHero 10y ago

I have the same thought in the Facebook Ads and Google Adwords control panel that I do sitting down at a craps table: "I'm going to lose all of this, aren't I?"

rlucas 10y ago
If you're sitting at the craps table then you're the only one who is likely to win...
shostack 10y ago
Are you very experienced with either? As someone who manages digital media for a living and has dealt with 8 figure budgets, I certainly don't feel that way. However I'm very aware of how expectations are often not properly set by either company. In their quest to reduce the friction to people's wallets Google and FB in some ways portray it as clicking a few buttons, creating a couple ads, selecting some suggested targets and you'll make a ton of money right off the bat. And perhaps that used to work to some degree. The reality is that professionals tend to change or disable most of the defaults because they don't perform well or have other issues. We then go in implementing tried and tested best practices, knowing full well performance will still suck initially and that we have a long, expensive road of testing and optimization before we have things dialed in. It is a tough business challenge because to some degree it is like trying to cram something simplistic like Paint into a hugely technical and complex platform like Photoshop. You just wanted to draw a damn cat, but there are all these confusing menus and tool bars, these weird layer things, and before you know it you've wasted an afternoon and end up just paying someone to draw it for you before you waste more time.

increment_i 10y ago

In my anecdotal experience, Facebook is really only good for the very top of the funnel. And even then it's sketchy. Creating awareness or piquing interest with your one sentence value prop (e.g "Never manage servers again!", "Write native iOS apps in COBOL!", etc.) seems to be the best use of it.

rezashirazian 10y ago

Facebook ads work best for retargeting. If someone has viewed your site and shown interest in your product but has not converted.

greglindahl 10y ago
Don't many customers view this as being creepy? Does it cause more brand damage than the sales are worth?
- rezashirazian 10y ago
  I don't think retargeting is particularly creepy. What is creepy is that when my in-laws were visiting for the first time I had a American Express ad with Tina Fey congratulating me on meeting my in laws for the first time. the ad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rEX5e-_YxxA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rEX5e-_YxxA
  - lostlogin 10y ago
    That would put me off both the advertiser and the platform (Facebook? Google?) for life.

jyu 10y ago

If you've spent $1000, got 20 clicks and 0 sales, then either your targeting or your ad or both are piss poor. I have made quite a lot of money (and lost quite a lot in the beginning) advertising on Facebook ads in the past. Just because you have a lot of experience with Google Search PPC doesn't mean you'll have success with Facebook, and visa versa. It depends very much on the product, how broad or niche the appeal is, the price point, the approaches you've tried. You need to know the target demographics of who your customer is, and Facebook is one of many cost effective avenues to reaching certain types of people. You need to be creative in creating great ad images, ad copy, a good landing page, and measuring actions that tie directly to increased revenue. These are all basic common sense things, but I have yet to see someone's campaign that didn't have some obvious flaw that set them up for failure. There are a lot of ways to fail and only a few ways to succeed.

NicoJuicy 10y ago
In my opinion, the niche with likes are mostly people who like everything
JPTeasdale 10y ago
Yeah, I know there is a way to do it. I assume most people who are also just coming out of a Kickstarter will have a similar lack of experience with online marketing. I could be more clear about the purpose being to temper expectations.

jseliger 10y ago

That was pretty much ours: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12969922 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12969922. Our best advertising bang has for years been our blog: http://www.seliger.com/blog http://www.seliger.com/blog, in part because many of the topics we write about are also the kinds of search strings people interested in hiring us tend to use.

NicoJuicy 10y ago

I had success with Facebook with Pokemon Go, I don't believe it's easy reproducible on a lot of other things. I wrote everything down here : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12858993 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12858993 Tldr; don't do Facebook ads if your not doing a hype and if don't want to give things away for free If you only want useless likes locked in on Facebook, you should do go all on. Remember, you can't easy notify the people who liked your page even though you payed for them

sbov 10y ago

Ours wasn't as dismal (the zero sales part), but in order to get a sale we had to spend ~5 times as much on Facebook ads vs. Google ads. The bounce rate alone from Facebook ads was just under 3x that of Google ads - around 90%. I'm assuming a lot of Facebook ad clicks are accidental.

dxbydt 10y ago

Try a good subreddit. So far spent <$5, got 300+ impressions, 5 click throughs and 5 subscriptions.

JPTeasdale 10y ago
Thanks for the tip. I will look at that.
jakebellacera 10y ago
Agreed. Tight-knit communities are by far the best way to market your product/service. Low volume, but high quality if you can pull it off. The catch is that you have to toe the line between being "that annoying marketing person" and someone who's genuinely trying to help out the community. If you aren't trying to help them out, then you'll find yourself being voted out of the tribe very quickly.

cyberferret 10y ago

About 4 years ago, we got fairly good response rates from Facebook advertising (for SaaS apps, rather than physical products), but nowadays, FB advertising is next to useless. The stats in the article pretty much reflect what we see these days. At most, we get 'Likes' on our app FB page, but pretty much NEVER get any click throughs or sign ups to our apps.

semi-extrinsic 10y ago

Well, Facebook's been around for about ten years now, and people tend to check it about once a day, on average, with (say) 5 ads per visit. So you've personally been served something like 20 000 targeted (!) ads on Facebook, if not more. Have you ever intentionally clicked one? I sure haven't.

frikk 10y ago
I'll say one thing about FB advertising. It really is starting to get creepy. I recently entered several new markets and FB was the first to start advertising. I can't believe I'm saying it, but I clicked a few links. A few of them I opened a new tab and googled the company name, just to feel less grimy.
- 467568985476 10y ago
  That probably still counted as an attribution.
  - frikk 10y ago
    You're probably right.
robryan 10y ago
Sponsored articles from pages I have already liked I sometimes click on. Retargetting works okay for us, nothing amazing but at the same time it isn't throwing money away.
- zem 10y ago
  i've stopped liking pages entirely because facebook has started showing you sponsored content from pages your friends liked. i didn't mind clicking like to increase the like count for companies i wanted to support, but i do not want to have any part in my friends being shown ads.
ninjakeyboard 10y ago

aantix 10y ago

You guys may be in a position to make Facebook Ads work, because of your existing customer list. If I recall correctly, setting up the appropriate demographic channels is way too hit or miss. It'll be an expensive education. BUT, if you have an existing customer list (like yourselves), FB gives you an option to upload those existing customer emails and it will do some AI matching to find the appropriate customer demographic pools? From the tutorial I read, this was the only chance you'd have to get any sort of traction on your campaign right out of the gate. Disclosure #1 : I've never run a Facebook ad campaign in my life just read several tutorials regarding running a successful campaign. Disclosure #2: I don't remember where I read this information, but given the fact that FB knows everyone's interests (directly and indirectly from statuses and likes), their algorithmic assessment of who should see the ad could be worth trying.

mbesto 10y ago

FB works really well for established brands, because of the sharing component and the idea that when you see the ad it doesn't look like an ad.

chimpnuggets 10y ago

You have to find your audience, which is usually doable, but takes iteration and experimentation. The trick is keeping the cost of testing as low as possible. 100 $1 campaigns are going to have a better return than 1 $100 campaign.

Pils 10y ago

It's widely known that Facebook is worse than Google in terms of conversions. People go to search engines to find something, people go on to Facebook to browse Facebook. What Facebook offers over Adwords is fine-tuned demographic targeting. So it's good for brand awareness (think traditional TV ads) and products that require targeting very specific demographics where the few conversions are highly valuable(new CS grad hiring, women on dating websites).

shostack 10y ago
It very much depends on your goal. Many advertisers, myself included would say "it depends on your goal." Search has some major limitations over paid social for things like branding campaigns. Even for direct response it is hardly black and white. I have FB campaigns that have performed better than some search campaigns.

yoo1I 10y ago

This turns out to be an argument for ad-blocking. By blocking all ads, because I am not going to buy anything from an ad anyhow, I'm not being counted towards your bill, which makes things cheaper for you and more pleasant for me. You're welcome.

incogitomode 10y ago
Yes, exactly that. I'd love an easy option to only include ads on sites that I trust, or that do ads well, and some reliable metrics surrounding that. Then content producers could get some feedback on "ad acceptance rates" and create better user experiences. Now that I think about it, one of the most obnoxious things about online ads isn't that they are eerily intelligent, but that they are still mostly dumb forms of broadcast.
bduerst 10y ago
Only for awareness marketing. Usually direct response marketing (like ads to buy a game) is paid per click, so you weren't getting people charged before you started ad blocking, when you weren't clicking on the ad anyways. And as a beside, people typically don't do direct response marketing to engineers, because it's known they don't click on ads and they're better marketed to through referrals from other engineers and online content (like this article).

jscheel 10y ago

Hahahahahaha, I've blown much, much more for the same result. Lesson learned.

jrgifford 10y ago

That's the ROI I'm seeing at some of my clients. That said, there is one that is having great success ($10/conversion, average conversion value $200 @ 40% margin) with it because of how they targeted their ads and what they're for (consumer products).

bduerst 10y ago

$50 CPC is not unheard of before optimizing the ad content or ad targeting. Keep in mind that Facebook ads are more like display ads than search ads - users don't necessarily have a specific intent when getting the impression, so they're less likely to give you a direct response.

sean_patel 10y ago

> Is that for real? Is everyone else's experience with Facebook advertising similar? Yeah. It's called "Facebook Fraud". See a real live experiment someone did, to figure out the true reach and ROI on Facebook Advertizing. => https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVfHeWTKjag https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVfHeWTKjag I too did a similar experiment using a pre-paid Visa card (for 50$) so that FB doesn't keep charging my Credit Card and/or lets it get stolen from bad security practices. My results were similar to the guy in the Youtube Video. Facebook's likes and "reach" are mostly automated or from in-house click-farms in South-east asia (think India, Vietnam, Phillipines etc)

vacri 10y ago
That video is well worth a watch, but to summarise it: the channel owner's users are predominantly first-world and engage with his channel to some degree. He purchased FB advertising to promote his channel, and got a huge amount of traffic 'from' third-world locations that didn't engage (leave comments, etc) and that came from content-free FB accounts that liked hundreds to thousands of FB pages with no particular pattern. Couldn't be more obviously a scam if it was twirling a waxed moustache.
- asdfasdfa11112 10y ago
  I've had this experience as well. I'd love an opportunity to chat with someone who runs these click farms for a living, so I can understand their motivations a little more clearly. I can't wrap my head around why someone would run a bot farm to click on my FB ads. It's not like AdSense, where they're getting a cut. I've read a theory it's to hide the bot accounts from Facebook's bot-detectors. But if people like in your experience can easily ID the obviously fake accounts, FB can (using the same criteria you mentioned). I get FB has moral hazard to allow bot clicks, because they get paid. But if they're so sophisticated as to require fake engagement on ads (which is why I care -- I'm getting charged!), wouldn't they also be monitoring the simple heuristic you provided? This could be explained by Facebook requiring bots to make them money to not get banned, but I don't think there's sufficient evidence for such a conspiracy just yet. In the end, all I care about is how much I put into FB ads, and how much directly attributable revenue that generates. The fraud might hide otherwise profitable campaigns (ones that don't break even), but frequently this isn't the primary concern. (My concerns are usually, "does this part of Lake Facebook have any fish I can catch?", followed by the step 2 of optimizing the campaign to get a positive ROI.

barkingcat 10y ago

Anecdotal response: As a user, I hate facebook ads so much that the dislike bleeds into the product/service being advertised. I'm sure xyz widget is great on its own, but facebook insists on inserting ads into really strange contexts, like next to a heart felt eulogy by my friend or someone's random anti-Trump rant that I am tagged in. Facebook ads for me are "anti-ads". They associate the product with really bad feelings through poor contextualization.

prawn 10y ago
Not a Facebook user, but I see Twitter ads. If they're irrelevant to my interests, and almost all are, I flag them with the "Not relevant" link, which has become the awkwardly named "I don't like this". I'm routinely surprised that despite me talking openly about my interests, I just don't get relevant ads. On one of my most frequently used sites (about basketball), the ads this week have been all womens fashion. I've not searched womens fashion and my wife doesn't use my laptop or phone. Waste of ad money.
- nostrebored 10y ago
  The timing of the ad makes me think that they are going after holiday shoppers. Might not be a waste?
  - prawn 10y ago
    In theory perhaps you're right. But for women's dresses, I'd be advertising to women, not hoping men dare buy clothes for their partner!
- yorwba 10y ago
  They probably guessed that you were male and then showed you women's fashion to make you buy something for your wife. I have come to understand advertising a lot better since I asked, while looking at some lingerie ad, "Who would ever want to wear something like that?" and someone replied "This ad is for your spouse who wants to see you in this."

ozi 10y ago

No, those results are beyond abysmal. CTR for my campaigns rarely dip below 2% with optimized advertisements and audiences.

thefalcon 10y ago

I've actually had good experience with selling hugely discounted shoes through Facebook ads. But then our target market was older women who legitimately enjoyed sharing their love of our $9 shoes with their Facebook friends.

ClassyJacket 10y ago

I've had amazing results with Facebook ads. We usually turn 20$ into a couple of sales of 40$ items with high margins. I've got a new ad going up in 4 hours. That being said, if the profit margin on the items wasn't so high it would be far worse. We're in a particularly good position that way. But on the other hand I haven't done alot of analytics or improvement on the ads either.

rpeden 10y ago

I've seen quite a few Shopify store owners in a group on Facebook mentioning that they've had good results using Facebook ads. I've only used Facebook ads to have a bit of fun and boost a picture of my cat[1]. He got a couple of likes after I'd spent about 50 cents, which pretty much achieved my goal. [1]https://www.facebook.com/gerrytuxedocat/posts/1218470848199855 https://www.facebook.com/gerrytuxedocat/posts/12184708481998...

encoderer 10y ago

No different than AdWords, many people lose money. But many people make money, too. The first mistake is thinking "how hard could it be?"

kybernetyk 10y ago

Worse. At least they got clicks. (But tbh. that was some years ago when the advertising stuff was new to FB ... so maybe it got better by now).

nickpsecurity 10y ago

You'd be surprised how your marketing strategies will fail when starting a business. Best, recent writeup is Clifford's below. Really shows the level of apathy and confusion you will experience. :) https://medium.com/@cliffordoravec/expect-everything-to-be-unexpected-883642c0d7c https://medium.com/@cliffordoravec/expect-everything-to-be-u...

appleiigs 10y ago

We've spent $2300, reached 140,000 people (according to FB). 11,000 of those visited our website. We also have 7300 likes on our Facebook page which we post to every few days. $2,300 on marketing is peanuts, so we believe is worth it to be able to directly contact 7,300 people who expressed interest in our business. These people are also liking and sharing our posts.

mdrzn 10y ago
You have 7300 likes on the Facebook page, you can't directly contact those 7300 people. There's a huge difference.
- appleiigs 10y ago
  Can you explain the difference for me? When we post, it shows up in their FB feed.
  - r3bl 10y ago
    Not to everyone. Neither do all of the pages that you've liked over the years show up in your news feed. Basically, the procedure is the following: post is shown to a small minority while a proportion of the people seeing it engages with your content: show the content to more people So, if the initial... let's say 200 people that see the post on your Facebook page are not engaging with it, the content wouldn't be spread further among people who liked your page. If they engage with it, the content will be spread further. That small minority decides the future of your post. If you have non-genuine likes that are not interested in your content at all (as in, not engaging with it), but they see the post first, you're gonna have to spend money to promote posts.
    - mdrzn 10y ago
      This. Also, under each post there should be written how many people it has reached.

dtwhitney 10y ago

A company I know well cough is built an app and pays about $7/download via Facebook ads. This company has tried many other options and while it has gotten more conversions using alternatives, the users have tended to be poorer in quality (much lower DAUs/MAUs). I have heard the average cost/download via Facebook is lower than $7 (maybe $5) for an app like this one, but I think it has been worth the money spent, and I would/will do it again. And yeah this company has spent quite a bit more than $1k on these ads. Downloading a free App is a lower hurdle than buying a card game, so it doesn't surprise me that the author didn't see many conversions. I have read that if your customer acquisitions costs are less than or equal to the money you expect to make off of them during your first year with the customer (supposing a subscription model, not unlike a card game with expansion packs), then you are doing well. The author has seen that his customers have often become repeat customers, so it may be ok to expect that $17.76 is an ok price to pay per converted user, so long as you expect some larger percentage of them will come back for expansion packs. Some notes: DUDE! it took me WAY TOO LONG to figure out where to buy your game! The link to the product is at THE VERY BOTTOM of your Medium article. PUT IT AT THE TOP WHERE YOU MENTION IT FOR THE FIRST TIME (sorry for yelling). Make it easy for people to find and buy your game!

JPTeasdale 10y ago
Haha, you got it!
- retreatguru 10y ago
  I like that the price of your game $17.76 hints to the date of the Declaration of Independence.

Trundle 10y ago

Plenty of companies have success. There are tons of digital marketers killing it on there. The level of targeting you can achieve is absurd. It's zero sum game where you compete against other advertisers though. Because of this it seems incredibly obvious to me that it'll almost certainly be unprofitable until you've done a lot of work to optimise your campaign (as you're competing with bids against people who have optimised their campaigns) and also probably be incredibly unprofitable if you're not a full time professional digital marketer specialising in facebook ads (because that's who you're most likely competing against for eyeballs). Yet I see average punters throwing tiny budgets around and failing at facebook used as evidence that facebook advertising is garbage on a regular basis.

JPTeasdale 10y ago
Oh, I'm not trying to make the case that it's impossible. Just that it seems a lot easier than it is. Most people coming out of a Kickstarter wont have several thousand dollars to figure out how to say "This hoodie, created by a mom, is over 1,000,000 on Kickstarter".

odbol_ 10y ago

It's pretty hard, and super expensive. One thing that really helped us is AdEspresso. Give it a few different pictures and blurbs, and it combines them in all possible ways and A/B tests all the combinations. Then you can pick the winners and refine them. Indispensable tool, even though we only got up to a 2% click-through rate (avg is 3-4%)

ChrisNorstrom 10y ago

Yes. Same here. I've tried Google Adwords, Facebook Ads, Reddit Ads, BlogAds aimed at design websites, and a custom placement by a site itself (paid $300 for a top header ad (the best position) and got nothing from it.) Literally hundreds of dollars wasted and not a single sale. I was pissed. People ignore ads. 1 year I was simply mentioned on DesignMilk.com and my calendar sold out. The following year I paid $300 to advertise at the top of DesignMilk.com and didn't get a single sale. That's what really made me realize advertising is highly unwanted. When I ask around to other inventors and sellers of physical products, Advertising is just a waste (except if you're selling a high priced item that can easily make the money back on a few sales). It's a suckers game if you're like me, selling a low cost item at high volume. If the advertising worked for all these businesses they would keep doing it. They don't. They run a few campaigns, advertise for a bit, watch it fail, then leave, and the next sucker takes their place. Unless you're one of those big box stores that advertise every week. But you are not walmart or target. You do not make millions in revenue a day. You cannot afford to run full color catalog ads bundled with newspapers every single week. Also, don't let flash sales fool you. Back when I sold my large format physical paper calendar on Fab.com (back when it was big, it went bankrupt and reorganized due to... spending too much on advertising and not enough revenue, ironic isn't it) I sold out in less than 1 month. All 300 units sold out at $15 each. When they reorganized I was literally ruined. They no longer took in calendars like mine. I was stuck selling on Amazon.com and Ebay.com and Etsy.com and sold just a few units. But man was the journey worth it. I lost thousands but I learned enough to justify it.

Kiro 10y ago

Not at all. My latest campaign gave me 129 clicks for $30.

thisiszen 10y ago

By tracking people that converted and then feeding that into Facebook's Lookalike Audience we were able to drop the cost per lead to about a third of the original cost over time (from $78 to $27). It beat everything else (TV, display ads, retargeting, SEM, etc), to the point where we only did that. We've noticed that every time we stopped the ads, or changed the targeting parameters/audience, it would take a while for Facebook to get back to the same results. p.s The lead cost was that high because we were selling $200k land + $500k houses from a small tropical country to US consumers that may have never even heard of that country.

gadders 10y ago

I bought a kickstarter after seeing it adverstised on Facebook. That is some anecdata at least. I have to say, though, a lot of the stuff advertised on Facebook and Instagram seems kind of dodgy. Unless I am just being targeted for dodgy stuff by their algorithms.

diegogcouto 10y ago

In my experience, we're able to create a lot more engagement using Facebook, but you have to consider that we're a niche startup in Brazil (where CPC seems to be cheaper). On the other hand, most of the users we got from Facebook were a kind of "freebie hunters". As soon as they saw it would be necessary to pay a monthly fee to use our services (It's an app! Am I really supposed to pay for this?), most of them disappeared. In the end, as someone has already mentioned here, Facebook seems to be a really good place to advertise free stuff or products that can naturally trigger some emotional response (Look at this lovely products made by this grandma)... and maybe just them.

lorda 10y ago

It seems extortionately high. I've just started with some small ads for an ecommerce site I'm playing about with. Currently costing £0.34 per click, with a relevancy of 6. This is optimising for sending visitors to my website though. If you focus on page likes or soemthing, then it's not likely you'll get very good off-site CTR